Painted or Candy Tetras?

[StevieM]

hello everyone, I was hoping to maybe get an answer to my question. I've been in some local fish stores lately and seen the same kind of tetra labeled a number of different ways. It is essentially the same fish and I believe they are the variety of dyed fish you might see out there. They go by the name " Candy Tetra" or "Painted Tetra" "Blueberry Tetra" or "Strawberry Tetra". They have the fins and shape like a Silver Tetra ( Ctenobrycon Spilurus ). I bought four of these about 4 months ago and was told they top out somewhere around the size of a quarter, although I've got one that is about a 50 cent piece at this point. I was curious if anyone has heard of them or had some experience with them before. I live in the western NY area if anyone has seem them in some of our local stores...thanks in advance for any assistance!!

steve

[ChilDawg]

Good catch...if they look like a Silver Tetra, they probably are. Here's the deal: Candy, Berry, or Jelly-Bean fish are likely to be dyed. Like painted glassfish, they are somehow cruelly dyed, the dye in them will fade or kill them (as might the method of delivery), and you have something different for that for which you paid. Hopefully they will survive and behave like undyed tetras. Good luck!

[Billy Bob]

Actually, I think most of the "painted" tetras are really White Skirt teras, a pale form of the Black Widow tetra.

http://freshaquarium.about.com/library/profiles/blfw0005.htm (White Skirt var.)

Do your fish look like this?

[wetmanNY]

As long as we're buying them, they'll go on dyeing them.

[ChilDawg]

Amen, Wetman. Though the campaigns to get stores to stop selling such fish worked in the U.K., we in the U.S. cannot seem to stop the practice because these admittedly pretty altered fish are some of the best sellers at LFS. There are some really pretty tetras that aren't dyed...as a matter of fact, from my first look at cardinals and glo-lites, I could have sworn that they were...lets try to, as a web community of fishkeepers, stamp out the practice by a boycott.

[Faramir]

I have never seen one at any UK shop, though I did see a notice once at a shop saying it would never sell them and advising people not to buy from shops that did. That was around '97-'98 I'd imagine.

I wasn't keeping fish between about '90 and '97, so they may have been available then.

You can do it if you publicise it enough, I'm sure!

[VoodooChild]

I'm actually pretty sure that Billy Bob is right in that the candy tetras and all of its synoms. are Gymnocorymbus ternetzi, black skirts or widows.

[StevieM]

I do believe that is the same fish I have. UNfortunately I purchased these fish shortly after setting up my tank and really didn't know much about them or fishkeeping in general. My girl liked them so there you go... Hindsight is always 20/20 though and if I knew then what i know now, there is no way I would have bought them....especially since the color has somewhat faded in the blue ones, to where they almost look silver.

[BluEyes]

Also, if they survive, they'll get much larger than a quarter. Closer to 1 1/2" given good care...

[VoodooChild]

I'm sure they will survive. It seems to me like those fish that had the dye bath as opposed to the injections have a much better survival rate. Painted glassfish drop like flies (also probably due to the lack of salinity), but the candy black skirts and cotton candy blood parrots seem to do just fine. It almost makes you wish they'd die right away, just so there wouldn't be any economic value behind them.

[StevieM]

At least one of them has in fact passed the quarter mark, he's a good 1.5" at this point, even bigger than my rams even though they were bought at roughly the same time. I've had them approximately 4-5 months at this point and they show no signs of weakness and are among the most active in my community tank. To be quite honest I think their original color would have contrasted better with my neons than they do right now!!